Is there one emotion you feel more than anything else?

• Do you think of yourself as “an anxious person” or “an angry person”?
• Perhaps you default to feeling guilt or shame when something doesn’t go as planned?
• Or maybe you struggle to connect to feelings at all, and mostly feel some version of numb

In reality, you are experiencing a whole range of different feelings

But when you’ve never been taught to distinguish them, the signals can get muddled:

• Overstimulation and social fatigue are often mistaken for anxiety
• Feeling unsafe can easily be misinterpreted as anger
• It can be hard to register your feelings at all until they become overwhelming

If you’re neurodivergent, like me, you’re more likely to have big feelings. And they’ve probably been repeatedly invalidated. Making it extremely hard to trust yourself, or even to feel safe paying attention to your inner world.

When you don’t know what you feel, you can’t effectively act on it

There’s a huge amount of information out there on how to manage feelings. You can find endless content telling how you to sit with your emotions or how to calm your nervous system.

But if you don’t know what’s going on inside in the first place, it’s impossible to know what to do about it. Anxiety management techniques won’t help if you’re actually overstimulated – in fact pushing through the “anxiety” is one sure way to make overstimulation worse!

Recognising your feelings is a skill you can practice and build

The great news – evidence shows that a regular practice of checking in and attempting to identify feelings makes a tangible difference. This practice can improve both how clearly the signals come through, and how accurately we identify what they’re telling us.

Not all feelings are emotions…

…but, most tools out there to help identify feelings only include emotions. All those emotions wheels and lists out there are brilliant, but they don’t include the full landscape of inner feelings.

That’s where Feelings Unjumbled comes in! When I couldn’t find a feelings tool that included nervous system states and physical feelings alongside emotions I set out to create my own, and the feelings grid was born.

Different brains are different

What works for one person may not work for another. I won’t tell you to meditate in a certain way, establish a specific sleep regime or use any particular breathing technique (though I have access to lots of those I can recommend if I think they might help).

Instead, I encourage you to use a simple four step process to build a gentle practice of focusing your attention inwards. And to experiment with naming and acting on what you find there. That way, you build your own knowledge of how and when different feelings show up for you, and your own personal toolkit of what to do about them.